The Gift of the Dragon

by Michael Murray

  For some reason Alice thought of the medical equipment in Moore’s offices. “Is she doing okay now? How old is she?”

  “Ten. The chemo was really hard on her. She’ll go back to Bethesda next month, and the docs will see whether it’s in remission.”

  “Sad for that to happen to a kid.” Alice suddenly remembered playing in a stream in the Oregon woods with Sara, the day before her tenth birthday. In her mind she saw Sara looking small and cute in blue shorts and a tank top, chasing minnows with a little net. Tears came to Alice’s eyes. Maybe Jenny was right. Maybe some of the memories are still in my head, and some may come back.

  She noticed Jacob looking at her oddly and blinked the tears away.

  He said softly, “It is sad.” Then, after a pause, he added, “Thank you.”

  She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

  Jacob restarted the motors and cast off the lines. They motored north, and then when they cleared the boat traffic in the channel, Jacob said, “Hold on.” Alice grabbed the metal pole holding the top of the boat up. Jacob pushed both throttle handles forward. The motors roared, smoke puffed, and the boat jumped up to plane. The wind blew her hair back as they flew up the channel.

  Michel

  Michel looked over his team as they lined up to board the Lear 31 light jet.

  After Thorn, the team was nominally led by Sanchez, a former Delta operator, tough and fast, as well as opinionated. He might have a first name, but he no longer used it. Thorn looked up his sheet one time and then knew why. Second in line stood Johan Siegert, a large, dark-haired veteran of the Kommando Spezialkräfte, the German special forces. He was the youngest on the team and the least-frequent bather. Hence, his nickname, “Pigpen.” He was also desperate to show his worth and so a good choice for the point in a dangerous mission. Next to him stood Martin Almaribe, an Arab-Australian who rose as high as one of his heritage could in the Australian Special Air Service Regiment. Martin had a happy attitude and a never-fading suntan. He was quick with a joke and slow to anger. Just don’t suggest to him that he have a Foster’s, the idea that real Australians liked to drink Foster’s being the one thing Thorn found that would make Almaribe angry—every time he said it.

  Last in line stood Alan Marsdale, former British Special Air Service. He had retired with just about every decoration available to a man of the SAS.

  Laird Northwin often said that Apple Creek’s security force, known to Apple Creek customers as Guardian Security and to those within the company as The Guardians, was made of the very best soldiers in the world. The reward for loyal service was nearly invaluable, after all. However, for a mission he expected to involve murder, Thorn preferred a team with skeletons in their closet. His files contained dirt on all these men but Marsdale, dirt that would be good enough for twenty to life in the USA if it became public.

  Marsdale, Thorn didn’t worry about, the man looked forward to action as a drug addict looked for his next fix. He lived for the chase and the kill at the end.

  Thorn looked them over. Each dressed casually, in shorts and short-sleeved shirts as ordered. Each carried a long duffel bag, which Thorn knew would contain black fatigues, flak jackets, and civilian clothes for travel. Each also packed a short-barreled SCAR assault rifle along with the various handguns and knives they preferred as secondary and tertiary weapons.

  “Good job on the dress, men. In this movie, we’ll be fishermen until the action starts, so you’ll need extra short-sleeved shirts, shorts, and sandals. Anyone want to re-pack?”

  Marsdale raised his hand. Without waiting for approval, he asked, “Will we need heavy weapons, or is this hand-to-hand?”

  “Bring everything, but it will be stowed most of the time. We’ll use the heavy stuff only if we need it. If everyone has their stuff together, let’s get on the plane, and I’ll give you dolls the full mission brief.”

  “Fuck you, sir!” said Marsdale with a grin. The others laughed, grabbed their bags, and trooped on board.

  The men piled their duffel bags in the compartment behind the last row of seats and then sat down.

  The plane was configured with four seats facing forward and two facing back. Thorn sat in the backward facing seat at the front of the plane and said, “Don’t fasten your seat belts yet, babes, this flight takes about forty-five minutes once we leave, but we have a fine private place here to talk about what we will do when we land!” Thorn looked each man in the eye in turn. “We’re after at least two dangerous gonks who disrupted a plan of Mister Northwin’s. He’s a little upset about it, which means we are all completely pissed off. Are you all pissed off?”

  Sanchez looked surprised, Johan said “Yah!” Almaribe said, “Yeah,” looking bored, and Marsdale jumped in a bit after Pigpen with, “Definitely!”

  “One is a deadly yet lovely female. She used to be part of the Apple Creek family, and then she became a traitor. The other we don’t know about, but he killed a couple of our brothers. Northwin wants them both alive. Got it? Armed, dangerous, trained killers, and we should bring them in alive.”

  “If possible, sir?” Marsdale ventured.

  Thorn grinned widely. “Yeah, as with all missions, ‘if possible’ applies.”

  Northwin’s men knew their boss had been in the field himself. He respected his people and generally supported them if they went a bit above and beyond—or even a bit below and inside.

  “There are two of them, then, sir?” Marsdale asked.

  “Yes, two targets on a boat.” Thorn pulled out a bag of chewing tobacco and put a wad in his cheek. “Now, I’ve looked into this kind of boat, a power catamaran. Some idiot Somali pirates I took care of in the Indian Ocean used a similar boat. They pulled one off a hijacked transport and attempted to attack a ship my team was guarding. I found that an RPG round in the center of the vessel, between the two hulls, will split it apart.” Thorn laughed at the memory. “The two halves of the boat went in opposite directions, leaving screaming pirates in the water. Beautiful sight.”

  Sanchez looked excited. “So we just need to find their boat and hit it with the RPGs!”

  “No, Northwin felt this mission should be handled by small arms alone. It costs money to cover up domestic use of heavy weapons, he says.” Thorn glared at Sanchez as though that must be his fault. “We’re stuck with these pea shooters.” Thorn hoisted his personal weapon, a short-barreled shotgun. “We’ll have RPGs, but we’re not supposed to use them. Unless we have to.”

  “So in a running chase, best to shoot the motors, eh, sir?” Marsdale said.

  Thorn sighed. “Yeah, that should work. The boat has outboards. They can be disabled with shots to the power-head.”

  “Uh, sir, where is that?” Pigpen asked.

  “It’s the big, square thing on top, Pigs,” said Almaribe.

  Seeing that Pigpen looked even more confused, Sanchez jumped in. “Not the square thing on top of your neck, Pigpen. The tops of the motors… shoot them.”

  “O… okay. I understand it.”

  “Great, I’m so glad we are all on the same page on that.” Thorn spat into a paper cup. “Now, as for how we find them, our geeks have figured out how to track their boat.”

  Thorn pulled out an iPad and tilted it so the team could see it. Its screen displayed an aerial view of the western keys on the screen, with a blue line on it. “This is real-time imagery from our Aerostar drone. The path looks like it stops at Sugarloaf Key.”

  The team looked at the map where Thorn pointed. Shaped like a crooked finger, Sugarloaf Key sat with its fingertip pointing northward from Big Coppit Key. The line ended at the northernmost end, where the satellite image showed a few isolated waterfront homesteads cut out of a green forest.

  “It does not look like a Sugarloaf,” Pigpen said.

  “The name comes from a kind of pineapple: tastes very sweet—rots quickly,” Thorn said.

  Marsdale spoke up again. “Just to be sure I get it, Michel, the plan is we land, get on a boat of our own,
head over to where the track ends. Then, we locate our targets and bring them in.”

  “Exactly, Mr. Marsdale! The resolution of these images from the tracking drone is not detailed enough to be certain, but it looks as if they are headed for this house on Sugarloaf Key.” Thorn pointed at the map, his finger mashing the end of the blue line. “Big surprise, that house is owned by the sister of the man who worked for Tomas Guzman.”

  Almaribe spoke up, “You heard the one about the guy who was not afraid of Satan? Satan asks him why, and the guy says, ‘I was married to your sister for twenty-five years.’”

  “Hey, I resemble that remark!” Marsdale yelled.

  “Very funny. Now at ease that shit, and listen up!” Thorn glared at the men.

  “We’ll try to be really quiet down here. It’s too close to the mother ship. However, these are high-value targets, personally wanted by Mister Northwin. That means that we get them. If we have to make some noise, we will clean up the mess later. Any questions, girls?”

  “No questions here, Mr. Thorn,” said Sanchez.

  Thorn nodded and looked around. Then he said, “Pigpen! What is the mission?”

  Pigpen swallowed. He had been dozing off a bit. “Uh, find the catamaran. Find the targets. Bring them in. Make noise if we have to. Sir.”

  Everyone but Thorn laughed. “Fan-fucking-tastic! Remember though: no making noise unless I do it first. Got it?” He glared at Pigpen, whose Adam’s apple looked as if it would burst from his neck and roll across the floor.

  Marsdale broke the silence. “We got it, Thorn. Now, these spazmos may be just visiting that house. They may be getting ready to move on. We should too.”

  Thorn’s glare grew darker. Then he roared, “Right, enough wasting time!” He got up and turned toward the cockpit, yelling, “We’re all set. Let’s get this bitch in the air!”

  The pilot nodded. “Aye, boss, if you would take your seat?”

  “Oh aye, ca-pi-tan, I will take my seat gladly if that will help you get off the ground. Should I turn off my cell phone, also?”

  “No need for that, boss. We won’t be troubled by your little eye-Droid.” The plane shook as the pilot hit the throttles, and Michel stumbled. “Oops,” said the pilot.

  Thorn grunted and settled into his seat. He sat silently, looking out the window as the team joshed with each other during the takeoff, and soon the jet hit its cruising speed on the eighty-mile flight to Marathon Key.

  Alice

  Jacob pointed toward a long, wooden dock emerging from beneath a three-story house that seemed lost among the mangroves, palms, and pines on the shore.

  “That’s Nanette’s house.”

  The clear sea looked very shallow here. Jacob backed off the throttle, and the boat settled into the water as it slowed down. Slowly, with the motors coughing softly, Jacob began a series of maneuvers around coral heads that blossomed between the channel and Nanette’s pier. Looking down, she was amazed by the variety of colors she could see: brick-red corals, bright-purple sea fans, and schools of blue-and-yellow fish, all above snow-white sand in water so clear it seemed the boat floated on air.

  “This place is lovely!” Alice shouted.

  “It is. Nanette’s done well for herself since she left government service. The land here has been in our family for a few generations. It only held a half-ruined cabin before Nanette built this a few years ago. As a private contractor, she commands top dollar.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She’s an expert at reverse engineering. At the National Security Agency, she specialized at figuring out how our enemies made weapons. For example, improvised explosive devices.” Alice raised her eyebrows at the unfamiliar term. Jacob went on, “Homemade bombs. Bring one to Nanette, and she will tell you how it was made. The NSA would use that to track sales of the stuff the bad guys used, find out who was making the bombs.”

  “Wow!”

  “Yeah. She did the same thing with captured Russian or Chinese military hardware. Now that she works for herself, she mainly helps companies figure out how their competitors make products.”

  “Why do they pay for that?”

  “Well, they find out if patents are being infringed or if they can buy up the raw materials a competitor needs, things like that. They pay well for her advice.”

  Jacob pointed at Alice’s throat. “If anyone can tell you what that thing is, she can.”

  Alice held up her necklace, looking at it. She looked up in surprise as Jacob executed a sudden turn to the right, cursing.

  “I don’t think these coral heads move much, but everything around them does. The sand, the sea grass, they all change, which makes it hard to remember the right channel. We’re coming in at dead low tide. It is much easier at high tide. We would have at least of foot of water over even the taller coral heads here.”

  Alice nodded. “Well, it’s near enough to swim if you hit something now and this thing falls apart.”

  Jacob didn’t smile.

  She let him concentrate as she eyed the house they were approaching. The dock extended about one hundred fifty feet from the base of the house, crossing a sandy beach and a breaker line of coral, which probably lay just under the water at high tide. The house itself stood three stories tall, with a pool on the right side and then a second-story deck. As they got closer, she saw that the first floor consisted mostly of concrete pilings, presumably to elevate the building above the highwater point, with some walled-in areas like sheds between them. The house appeared to be surrounded by low bushes. In several places, a front yard peeked from beneath the bushes, looking as sandy as the beach but with a few scattered flower beds. On either side of the house, mangroves gave way to palms and pines. It sat under a metal roof that shone too brightly to look at in the morning sun.

  Jacob managed to maneuver around the coral heads without hitting any, and he brought the boat up alongside the dock. He expertly leaped off the deck up to the dock, wrapped the bowline around a cleat, and then tied the stern line. Alice saw that the seaward pilings of the dock were heavily padded with what looked like old fire-hose, and the rub rail of the boat bounced against this softly.

  Up close, many boards of the dock were dark and worn-looking. Some had big cracks or warped-up ends. Here and there were lighter-colored boards that must have been recently replaced. The clear water added an impressionistic blur to the bright colors beneath it. Silver flashes of schooling fish frequently punctuated the underwater scene.

  Jacob made a “lead the way” gesture, but Alice preferred to follow him into this new situation, so she deferred. He smiled, inclined his head slightly, and turned and walked up the dock toward the house.

  Alice tensed as a door banged from the other side of Jacob’s broad back. She leaned to the left to see around him, and then a figure of all brown skin and pink bikini burst from the house and ran toward them. “Uncle Jacob!” the figure yelled, and as she drew closer, Alice saw a girl of perhaps ten. Jacob yelled back, “Niece Anna,” laughing. The girl shrieked with joy and leaped into Jacob’s arms.

  Jacob spun her around on the dock and then put her down. “Anna, this is Miss Alice Sangerman.”

  Looking more closely at the girl, Alice saw she was thin with very short, dark hair. Big brown eyes looked up at her as the girl formally extended her hand. Brown eyes like Sara Moore.

  “Pleased to meet you, Miss San-ger-man,” Anna said, pronouncing each syllable with care.

  Shaking herself out of her reverie, Alice smiled and took the offered hand. “Call me Alice. It’s nice to meet you also, Anna…?”

  “Castellan!” Anna said firmly.

  Jacob laughed over Anna’s head.

  “My sister didn’t like her ex-husband’s name. And just as well—he didn’t last long.”

  Alice kept her smile but inwardly cringed. Not a good thing to say in front of the man’s daughter. Anna didn’t seem to notice, though, as she took Alice’s hand and said, “Come on, Mom has just finished making s
ome breakfast, and yesterday we got some ice cream!”

  The trio walked the rest of the way to the house. A cement seawall rose about four feet from the sand at the shoreline, and the dock ended there. Once they reached land, the wooden planks changed to a well-worn path that crunched beneath their feet. The sound made her look down, and she saw they walked on a thick layer of tiny shells, breaking them as they went. The path wound through dense green bushes trimmed to about six feet tall. It felt like a maze, and it made Alice claustrophobic after the open boat and dock.

  “Why do you have these hedges here?” Alice asked.

  Anna laughed. “Mom calls it the Mirkwood. They are mangroves. They help protect the house when it gets stormy.”

  As they walked up to the door, she heard Anna tell Jacob how she would catch lobsters for her mother to cook for him. As Anna reached for the handle, the door opened from within.

  A tall woman with dark-brown hair stood there in a white sleeveless blouse and blue jean shorts. In her height and hair and the shape of her face, Alice could see her relation to Jacob. Also like Jacob, she appeared to be in her early forties. Unlike Anna, she did not look happy to see Jacob.

  “Hello, Nanette. I’m sorry to drop in on you like this.”

  The woman stared at Jacob and then at Alice. Alice unconsciously put her hands to her hair, which she knew looked a mess after two days with no shower. Then she put her hands down, realizing that she hadn’t shaved in that time either. It might look as though we were having a party on that boat instead of running for our lives!

  Anna broke the tension. “Mom! I told Uncle Jacob all about the lobsters. After breakfast, can I go catch them?” Anna stopped to take what seemed like a huge breath and then continued, “This is his friend Alice, and she is nice. When we finish breakfast, can we have some of the coconut ice cream? Alice likes ice cream. I want to show her how to catch lobsters after we have some.”